Close Readings

Through her art, Kim encourages audiences to attend to the links between music and meaning, sound and other senses, perception and interpretation, and various modes of communication. She uses scores, graphical notation and text, and performance and media installations to explore how she and the larger Deaf community establish their own relationships to the world of sound.

For Close Readings, Kim edited together clips from five movies, removed the sound, and partially blurred the visuals. Then she invited four Deaf or hard-of-hearing collaborators to write unique captions, which she added to each channel above the existing studio captions. The four screens play in sync, showing vastly different verbal interpretations of the same scene and soundtrack, and underscoring how different approaches to captioning significantly impact viewing experiences.

Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies, 2023